Facebook is set to launch an official live streaming video channel called Facebook Live. Today at 3PM PST (6PM EST), actress America Ferrera will visit Facebook headquarters and use Facebook Live to talk about her new movie, “The Dry Land,” a Sundance Film Festival entry.
The new Facebook Live channel will incorporate Facebook’s real-time Live Feed technology to facilitate interactions between the viewing audience and the speaker. Facebook Live offers a feature similar to CNN Live’s use of Facebook Connect, which streams Facebook status updates in a sidebar to the right of the live video of a news event, most notably used for President Barack Obama’s inauguration.
Facebook says that this same technology will be used to create a “viral News Feed” story within the new channel. This is actually the same technology that Facebook used to stream the recent F8 conference, but now it’s official. Facebook Live will also offer an Ask a Question feature, which allows you to submit a question to a moderator within the channel. RWW believes this specific Q&A feature may be “brand-new and exclusive to Facebook.”
Facebook live is powered by Livestream.com, which we touched on in our coverage of Procaster last year. You may wonder why Facebook wouldn’t go with a more well-known player like Ustream, but it may simply boil down to their goals. Livestream seems more focused on quality and call themselves “the most powerful live broadcast platform on the internet.” Other players seem more focused on the social aspect.
Because it works via Livestream.com, Facebook Live can be embedded on any website with a bit of code. This gives website owners and publishers the ability to leverage official content from Facebook. For instance, an entertainment blog might want to catch Justin Beiber live, or a technology blog might want to catch an interview with a Facebook engineer.
It would seem like this event would be way more exciting if they kicked off the launch with a Q&A session from Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook team, or something else a little more relevant to technology. I have to agree with RWW in that we’re “geeks, nerds, techies and engineers” and the other 500 million or so users probably want to see Ferrera.
via Facebook Launching Official Live Streaming Channel: Facebook Live.
Update – It looks like Facebook live isn’t as original as we thought. Vokle, which we covered early on and then again when they went public, has been offering similar functionality for a while. A statement from Vokle CEO Robert Kiraz summarizes it best:
Though this is a proactive move for livestream, which is powering the live service, there are a certainly suspect similarities to what we’ve been doing since our launch; particularly the “ask a question” and screening features.
However, the scope of what we’re looking to achieve is via many-to-many video interactions and actual dialogue. Our central purpose is to humanize the web and make it a warmer, more personal place – something that appears to be philosophically lacking in this latest alliance.
Nonetheless, it’s an exciting time to be in the live streaming space, and we all look forward to changing the landscape of how people communicate online.